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Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez (May 10, 1934 - December 28, 2012) is an American poet and performance artist.Jayne Cortez, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. Web, Jan. 26, 2013. Life Jayne Cortez was born Sallie Jayne Richardson on the Army base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Her father was a career soldier who would serve in both world wars; her mother was a secretary. At the age of seven, she moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up in the Watts district.Busby, Margaret. "Jayne Cortez obituary: Poet whose incantatory performances could be militant, lyrical and surreal", The Guardian. Friday, January 4, 2013. Young Jayne Richardson reveled in the jazz and Latin recordings that her parents collected. She studied art, music and drama in high school and later attended Compton Community College. She took the surname Cortez, the maiden name of her maternal grandmother, early in her artistic career. Ms. Cortez was the author of 12 books of poems and performed her poetry with music on nine recordings. She presented her work and ideas at universities, museums, and festivals in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, the Caribbean and the United States. Her poems have been translated into 28 languages and widely published in anthologies, journals and magazines, including Postmodern American Poetry, Daughters of Africa, Poems for the Millennium, Mother Jones, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. In 1991, along with Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, Cortez founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), of which she was president. She was organizer of "Slave Routes: The Long Memory" (2000) and "Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization" (2004), both international conferences held at New York University. She appeared on screen in the films Women In Jazz and Poetry in Motion. Ms. Cortez also directed Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future (1999), which documented panels, readings and performances held during the first major international literary conference on women of African descent. In 1954, Cortez married jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman when she was 18 years old. Their son Denardo was born in 1956; he began drumming with his father while still a child and devoted his adult life to collaborating with both parents in their respective careers.Rubien, David. "Poet Jayne Cortez makes heady music with Ornette Coleman sidemen", San Francisco Chronicle. Friday, October 26, 2007. In 1964, Cortez divorced Coleman and founded the Watts Repertory Theater Company, for which she served as artistic director until 1970. Active in the struggle for Civil Rights, she strongly advocated using art as a vehicle to push political causes, with her work being used to register black voters in Mississippi in the early 1960s."Jayne Cortez Dies: Poet And Activist Passes Away At 78", The Inquisitr. January 5, 2012. Ms Cortez traveled through Europe and Africa, and moved to New York City in 1967. She founded the Watts Repertory Company in 1964. She formed her own publishing company, Bola Press, in 1972."Jayne Cortez, Academy of American Poets, Poets.org, Web, Jan. 2, 2012. In 1975, Cortez married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards. His work has appeared in her publications as well as on some of her album covers. Career Cortez wrote and performed with an uncompromising intensity all her own. Acerbic, hard-hitting, unsentimental and scathingly honest, her take on reality is so potent — and even pungent — that many poets may seem benign, or even superficial, by comparison. The musicians with whom Jayne Cortez aligned herself reflected the sociopolitical and cultural elements to which she attached the greatest importance. Born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona in 1934, she grew up near Los Angeles under the spell of her parents' jazz and blues record collection, which also included examples of Latin American dance bands and field recordings of indigenous American music. Early exposure to the recordings of Bessie Smith instilled in Cortez a deeply etched sense of female identity, which, combined with a strong will, shaped her into an uncommonly outspoken individual. She became transformed by the sounds of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and no-nonsense vocalist Dinah Washington, whose visceral approach to self-expression clearly encouraged the poet not to pull any punches. Cortez, who respected the memory of independent performing artist Josephine Baker, preferred to name inspirations rather than influences, especially when discussing writers. Those with whom she identified included Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Christopher Okigbo, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Wright. Parallels with the ugly/beautiful poetics of Federico García Lorca also suggest themselves. Her words were usually written, chanted, and spoken in rhythmic repetition that resembled the intricate, tactile language of African and Caribbean drumming. Most of her recordings have been issued under the auspices of Bola Press, a publishing company that Cortez founded in 1972. She cut her first album, Celebrations and Solitudes, at White Plains, New York, in 1974. A set of duets with bassist Richard Davis, it was released on the Strata-East label. The first Bola Press recording, taped in October 1979, was called Unsubmissive Blues and included a piece "For the Brave Young Students in Soweto." Cortez commenced delivering her poetry backed by an electro-funk modern jazz group called the Firespitters, built around a core of guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Al McDowell, and drummer Denardo Coleman. For years, the Firespitters and Ornette Coleman's Prime Time coexisted with Denardo as the axis and various players participating in both units. During the summer of 1982, Cortez delivered There It Is, an earthshaking album containing several pieces that truly define her artistry. These include: "I See Chano Pozo," a joyously evocative salute to Dizzy Gillespie's legendary Cuban percussionist; a searing indictment of patriarchal violence called "If the Drum Is a Woman"; and, "US/Nigerian Relations," which consists of the sentence "They want the oil/but they don't want the people" chanted dervish-like over an escalating, electrified free jazz blowout. Recorded in 1986, her next album, Maintain Control, is especially memorable for Ornette Coleman's profoundly emotive saxophone on "No Simple Explanations," the unsettling "Deadly Radiation Blues," and the harshly gyrating "Economic Love Song," which is another of her tantrum-like repetition rituals, this time built around the words "Military spending, huge profits and death." Among several subsequent albums Cheerful & Optimistic (1994) stands out for the use of an African kora player and poignant currents of wistfulness during "Sacred Trees" and "I Wonder Who." Additionally, this album contains a convincing ode to anti-militarism in "War Devoted to War" and the close-to-the-marrow mini-manifestos "Samba Is Power" and "Find Your Own Voice." In 1996, her album Taking the Blues Back Home was released on Harmolodic/Verve; Borders of Disorderly Time, which appeared in 2002, featured guest artists Bobby Bradford, Ron Carter, and James Blood Ulmer. In 1991, Cortez co-founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa with Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, and served as its president for many years thereafter. Ms. Cortez was planning a symposium of women writers to be held in Ghana, May 2013."Poet-performer Jayne Cortez dies in NY at age 78", The Wall Street Journal. Saturday, January 5, 2012. An educator, publisher, and internationally acclaimed writer whose works have been translated into many languages, Cortez appeared in the films Poetry in Motion by Ron Mann and Women in Jazz. Her impact upon the development of spoken-word performance art during the late 20th century has yet to be intelligently recognized. In some ways her confrontational political outspokenness and dead-serious cathartic performance technique place Cortez in league with Judith Malina and The Living Theater. According to the online African-American Registry, "Her...ability to push the acceptable limits of expression to address issues of race, sex and homophobia place her in a category that few other women occupy." Later life She maintained two residences, one in New York City and one in Dakar, Senegal, which she said "really feels like home." Jayne Cortez died of heart failure in Manhattan, New York, on December 28, 2012."Jayne Cortez Dead: Poet-Performer Dies At 78", HuffPost Celebrity, January 5, 2013. A memorial celebration of her life, organised by her family on February 6, 2013, at the Cooper Union Foundation Building, included tributes by Amiri Baraka, Danny Glover, Robin Kelley, Genna Rae McNeil, Quincy Troupe, Steve Dalachinsky, George Campbell Jr., Eugene Redmond, Rashidah Ishmaili, and Manthia Diawara, as well as musical contributions by Randy Weston, T. K. Blue and The Firespitters.DooBeeDooBeeDoo, February 7, 2012. The Spring 2013 issue of The Black Scholar (Vol. 43, No. 1/2) was dedicated to her memory and work.Norman Otis Richmond aka Jalali, "Diasporic Music: Don Drummond, Jayne Cortez and more!" Uhuru News, November 8, 2013. Recognition * Arts International * the National Endowment for the Arts * the International African Festival Award * The Langston Hughes Award * 1980 American Book Award Publications * Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares. York?: Phrase Text, 1969. *''Festivals and Funerals''. New York: Cortez, 1971. * Scarifications. New York: Cortez, 1973. * Mouth on Paper. New York: Bola Press, 1977. * Firespitter. New York: Bola Press, 1982. *''Poetic Magnetic''. New York: Bola Press, 1991. *''Coagulations: New and selected poems''. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1984. * Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere. New York: Serpent's Tail, 1996. *''Jazz Fan Looks Back''. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose, 2002. * The Beautiful Book. Bola Press 2007. *''On the Imperial Highway: New and selected poems''. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose, 2009. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Jayne Cortez, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, June 22, 2014. Audio / video Film * "Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future," Recordings *1974: Celebrations & Solitudes (Strata-East Records) with the Firespitters. * "Taking the Blues Back Home," produced by Harmolodic and by Verve Records * "Borders of Disorderly Time" released by Bola Press * "Find Your Own Voice" released by Bola Press See also * List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *Jayne Cortez profile & 2 poems at the Academy of American Poets *Jayne Cortez: Online poems. ;Audio / video * Jayne Cortez at YouTube ;Books *Jayne Cortez at Amazon.com ;About * "Jayne Cortez" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica * Poet Jayne Cortez makes heady music with Ornette Coleman sidemen, San Francisco Chronicle * Jayne Cortez (1936- ) at Modern American Poetry. * Jayne Cortez Official website. Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:African American poets Category:African American female poets Category:American poets Category:Strata-East Records artists Category:Jazz poetry Category:American women writers Category:20th-century poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Women poets